SCIENCE 



Friday, April 2, 1920 



CONTENTS 



The University Department of Medicine: Dr. 

 BuFus Cole 329 



Saymond B. Earle: Professoe Edward S. 

 Burgess 340 



Hesolutions on the Death of Members of the 

 Mellon Institute 340 



Scientific Events: — 



Memorial to Sir William Osier; The Cor- 

 nell University Entomological Expedition to 

 South Africa; The American Chemical So- 

 ciety; The United States Forest Service. . . . 341 



Hfio Notes and News 344 



University and Educational News 346 



Discussion and Correspondence : — 



The U. S. Geological Survey: Dr. Eliot 

 Blackwelder. The Award of the Nobel 

 Prize to Professor Haber: Jerome Aiex- 



ANDEE 346 



Scientific BooTcs : — 

 A EandbooTc of Physics Measurements : A. 

 deP. P 348 



Special Articles: — 



Notice of a Mecent Contribution to Statis- 

 tical Methods: Drs. George F. McEwen and 

 Ellis L. Michael 849 



The American Chemical Society: Dr. Charles 

 L. Parsons 350 



The American Association for the Advance- 

 ment of Science: — 



Section B — Physics: Professor G. W. 

 Stewart 352 



MSS. intended for publication and books, etc., intended for 

 review should be sent to The Editor of Science, Garrison-on- 

 Hudson, N. Y. 



THE UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF 

 MEDICINE 



That all is not well with medical education 

 is obvious from the number of investigations, 

 addresses, polemics, plans and schemes which 

 at present center about this subject. In the 

 writer's opinion the root of the difficulty lies 

 in the extremely close association Vhich has 

 always existed and exists to-day between med- 

 ical education and practise, and in the idea 

 which generally prevails that the problems re- 

 lating to medical education and those having 

 to do with the practise of medicine are insep- 

 arable. While many persons admit for pur- 

 poses of discussion that a line of separation 

 exists between the science of medicine and the 

 art of the practise of medicine, yet when these 

 individuals begin to think in practical terms, 

 they fail to take this fact into consideration. 

 Indeed, in their inmost souls, most medical 

 men refuse to admit that medicine is a science, 

 or they think of the scientific side of the sub- 

 ject as something apart from medicine itself, 

 as though scientific medicine were simply the 

 group of underlying sciences upon which medi- 

 cine depends for sustenance. Even Sir Clif- 

 ford Allbutt, in his remarkable essay on the 

 " ISTew Birth of Medicine," speaks of the new 

 birth as an " enlargement from an art of ob- 

 servation and empiricism to an applied sci- 

 ence . . ., from a craft of tradition and sagac- 

 ity to an applied science." Why is it that we 

 can conceive of medicine only as an applica- 

 tion of science to an " art " or " craft," and not 

 as a new, real and independent science replac- 

 ing an obsolete mass of tradition and empir- 

 icism ? 



It is true that the science of medicine is in 

 the process of making — ^but so is every other 

 science. There is no such thing as a rounded, 

 completed or finished science. At any given 

 time any science is but the result of all previ- 

 ous attempts to arrange in order and to explain 



